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“... race’ – little more than an apology by a ‘parson of the English State Church’ for his own class interest. At the time he published the Essay, Malthus was indeed a parson – curate of Okewood in Surrey – and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s ...”

“... to make this a better world’). Her politics is normally more than reasonable, but this recent war has played havoc with her judgment. She is not alone. As I get close to the town, military radio lists a host of northern locations and instructs their inhabitants to make for shelters and safe places, an announcement whose wisdom is confirmed by the heavy ...”

“... to ‘rack-renting’, defined as ‘to raise rent above a fair or normal amount’. In times of war or other emergencies, the ‘profiteer’ is soon identified, defined as ‘one who makes excessive profits esp. illegally or in black-market conditions’. The​ history of taxation is a rich field for studying such changing and inchoate, but ...”

“... the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a ...”

“... of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main impetus for engaging with it, at the front or in print, was anti-Fascism. But there was also a sense of atonement: a belated opportunity to stand up and ...”

“... harrowing account of the mental disorders Fanon encountered as a psychiatrist during the Algerian War of Independence. The argumentative force of this closing chapter, and its position in the book, throw doubt on the first chapter. Violence was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonised communities and individuals who ...”

“... for, as Hutton points out, the net effect of all these changes was ‘the entrenchment of the old class structure that Tory radicals affected to despise’, with the gap between those able and those unable to afford private health, welfare and education far, far worse at the end than when it began. Hutton is also rightfully scathing about the extent to which ...”

“... that the best destabilisation technique the Americans have had over the last thirty years of Cold War has been Willis Conover, with his Voice of America programme beaming jazz two hours a night across the Iron Curtain. Not that Aksyonov presents his Moscow hippies as being in any sense politically vital. In one of the less ecstatic of his digressions, he ...”

“... within Europe, by contrast with England, or with Spain and Portugal growing up out of the war against the Moors within Iberia. One of the many Celtic mysteries, which Calder could not have found space to explore, is why Celtic society in old Ireland, but not in the Irish-Scottish Highlands, seems to have been rigidly divided between a ruling ...”

“... are still many places where one can live without papers and not too badly either, there are first-class plastic surgeons who will produce a better new face, and officials who will sell genuine identity cards and passports to fit it. But Escobar would not abandon his wife and children, whose lives were being threatened by a special Colombian police unit that ...”

“... He won his job and ended generations of Christian Democrat rule by appealing to younger middle-class voters – and their employers – who regard it as obvious that economic growth and carbon thrift go together. It wasn’t so obvious to the SPD boilermakers in Augsburg, with their eyes on traditional support in the old mining and steelmaking regions of ...”

“... This changed with the opening of the first purpose-built dance halls after the First World War, intended to cater to a lower-middle and working-class public whose wages were rising and who were eager to hear the new jazz music performed live. The new halls, constructed in every major town and city in the country ...”

“... is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most of the city’s leaders, and could trace his ancestors on his mother’s side back to the Trojan ...”

“... US army lieutenant-colonel much admired in military history circles for his books about World War Two, knows a real soldier when he sees one, and on most counts Churchill doesn’t measure up. He was certainly fascinated by soldiering from an early age – it was his toy soldiers, he claimed, that did it – but he seems to have gone to Sandhurst only ...”

“... A Very British Coup. We are concerned here with a Labour prime minister – a non-Oxonian, working-class version of Tony Benn – who is brought down, quietly and peacefully, by the forces of the ‘Establishment’ when he attempts to pull out of the American alliance and threatens the power of the newspaper-owners. This improbable prime minister is most ...”